Jeff, give Graham some breathing room. To quote your own words:
“His essays … are among the best writing I’ve found on software engineering.”
You are not alone with this opinion. Paul Graham has become an institution, recommended reading by professors and clueful people
around the world. And rightly so, at least in my humble opinion.
So, lately he has produced some text of subpar quality. At least
that’s my perception and apparently that of many others.
I, too, found his recent essays quite self-centric, heck even
boring at times. All this Y-Combinator inside stuff, and “everyone should be a founder”-rambling gets old fast.
Still, even his weaker essays are still miles ahead of anything that I have read on your blog so far. Think hard about who you criticize for what and where you are standing. It’s very easy to throw mud at the idols but so much harder to recover the credibility that you may lose in the process.
My take on the recent Graham essays is that he’s maybe so focussed
on his Y-Combinator stuff at the moment that his writing gets a bit lopsided. Nonetheless, even the essay that you cite contains so
much unfiltered insight from “someone who’s actually done it”,
biased or not, that I can hardly understand how you get to
words like “irrelevance”.
Can you point me to another “self-made millionaire in the tech business” (for the lack of a better description) that freely
shares a comparable amount of insight into his thoughts and
findings with the world?
Heck, one that even shares fairly detailed information about
how he runs his current business?
Ofcourse you are entitled to your opinion and free to dislike
his writing. But please, use the big ammo (“irrelevant”, “self-absorbed”) sparingly. At least until you, too, have a few millions in the bank or written a few essays of world fame.
Thanks.